SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion

Edited by Gabrielle McIntire and Jane de Gay

Pre-order
Format

£160.00

Pre-order

Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Explores Virginia Woolf’s engagements with a broad range of sacred and spiritual traditions

  • Provides a thorough re-assessment from a variety of perspectives about the received critical assumption that Woolf was an atheist
  • Emphasizes the relevance of Woolf’s work to twenty-first-century critical discourse about ethics and poetics, ecologies, sexualities, feminist and queer identities and sacred spaces
  • Intervenes in critical debates about the role of religion in early twentieth-century literature and culture

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion makes exciting interventions into debates about the beliefs and spiritual commitments of one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Although critics and readers have often assumed that Virginia Woolf is hostile or indifferent to religion, her work is, in fact, from early to late, traversed with reflections about religious, spiritual and sacred meaning and experience. Featuring twenty-eight new essays by established and emerging scholars, this Companion is the first to consider Woolf’s perspectives on global religious traditions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Quakerism within the context of literary and cultural modernisms. The volume draws on a diverse range of theoretical and critical methods to showcase the multi-layered complexities of Woolf’s approaches to the sacred. Together the contributors provide a thorough re-assessment of the assumption that Woolf was an atheist and illuminate insights about her work in relation to twenty-first century critical discourse about religion, ethics, spirituality and mysticism while giving new attention to feminist perspectives, queer desire, sacred ecologies and narrative poetics.

Reviews

This Companion is a superb contribution to modernist studies and a vital corrective to the idea that Woolf’s avowed atheism amounted to a flat rejection of religion as such. It provides extensive coverage of Woolf’s engagement with religion from several interlocking angles and demonstrates convincingly that, for Woolf, religion was less a settled rejection than an unresolved and generative tension running throughout her writing.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures

Introduction: Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion
Gabrielle McIntire with Jane de Gay

Part I: Modernist Contexts
1. Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Sacred
Elizabeth Anderson
2. ‘By conviction an atheist perhaps’: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury Artists and Religion
Mark Hussey
3. The Hogarth Press and Religion: A Modernist Mosaic
Diane F. Gillespie
4. Making Things More Spiritual: Virginia Woolf, Science and Religion
Michael H. Whitworth
5. The Psychology of Religion: Virginia Woolf, William James and Jane Harrison
Amy C. Smith
6. Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and the Varieties of Modernist Mysticism
Jamie Callison
7. Rebellion and Renunciation: Virginia Woolf’s Religious Heritage
Eleanor McNees
8. Leslie Stephen’s Agnostic Sensibility and the Generosity of Disbelief
Ryan Hitchcock
9. 'The Third Emotion’: Christianity, War and Pacifism in Three Guineas and Between the Acts
Charles Andrews

Part II: Religions, Faiths, Diversities
10. Virginia Woolf and the Critique of Secular Hope
David Sherman
11. Dwelling in Possibility: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Spiritualities
Kristina K. Groover
12. Gods, Goddesses and Divinities in Virginia Woolf's Writings
Stephanie Paulsell
13. Friendship as First Philosophy: Peace-Making and Quaker Traces in Jacob’s Room and Roger Fry
J. Ashley Foster
14. Virginia Woolf and Judaism
Vara Neverow
15. Virginia Woolf and Buddhism
Edward Upton
16. Virginia Woolf and Hinduism
Heidi Stalla
17. Virginia Woolf and Islam: The Androgynous Vision of Constantinople in Orlando
Leila Baradaran Jamili and Bahman Zarrinjooee
18. Virginia Woolf and the Christian Faith
Jane de Gay

Part III: Theories, Interpretations, Ethics, and Spaces of the Sacred
19. Virginia Woolf, Ecofeminism and Spirituality
Bonnie Kime Scott
20. Virginia Woolf, the Sacred and the Creaturely
Vicki Tromanhauser
21. ‘Granite and Rainbow:’ Agnosticism, Empiricism and Nature’s Memorials in Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf
Catherine W. Hollis
22. ‘Moments of Being,’ Ethics and the Good Life
Lorraine Sim
23. On Not Knowing Everything: Generative Agnosis and Epistemic Humility
Madelyn Detloff
24. ‘some “revelation” which reminds us:’: On Queer Possibility and Religious Rhetoric in To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway
Jennifer Mitchell
25. Virginia Woolf and the Soul
Gabrielle McIntire
26. ‘That great Cathedral space’: Virginia Woolf, Architecture and the Sacred
Alexandra Peat
27. Pilgrimage and Retreat: The Holiness of Home in To The Lighthouse
Spencer Morrison
28. Virginia Woolf and the Enchantments of Reading
Benjamin Hagen

Afterword
Pericles Lewis

Contributor Biographies
Index

About the contributors

Gabrielle McIntire

Gabrielle McIntire is Professor of English Literature at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008), Unbound (2021), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (2015). Her articles have been published in journals including Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, and Callaloo, and in book collections including The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse (2014), Futility and Anarchy: British Literature in Transition, 1920-1940 (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf (2021), The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion (2023), and A History of the Bloomsbury Group (2025). The recipient of two teaching awards, McIntire has been interviewed by Radio Free Europe and other media outlets about her work in modernist studies. Also a creative writer, McIntire’s poems have appeared in journals and collections in the United States, Canada, England and France.

Jane de Gay

Jane de Gay is an Anglican Priest. She was Professor of English Literature at Leeds Trinity University from 2017-25 and she is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (2018) and Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (2006), and editor of eight books including Virginia Woolf and Heritage: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, with Tom Breckin and Anne Reus (2017), and Voyages Out, Voyages Home: Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, with Marion Dell (2010). She has published articles in Woolf Studies Annual and Christianity and Literature, as well as chapters in collections such as The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives (2024), The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth, and Religion (2023), The Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf (2021), and Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf (2020).

More in this series

See the series →